The California state legislature passed a bill that would require
presidential candidates to disclose their past five tax returns in
order to qualify for California primary elections. The bill was
vetoed by Governor Brown, but what if it had become law?

Suppose Donald Trump ran for re-election in 2020, as seems likely,
barring his death or expulsion. And suppose he declined once again to
disclose his tax returns, and was excluded from the California
Republican primary election. I don't see how this could possibly hurt
Trump, and it could benefit him.

It doesn't matter to Trump whether he enters the primary or wins the
primary. Trump lost California by 30% in 2016. Either way he would
be just as certain to get the same number of electors: zero. So he
would have no incentive to comply with the law by releasing his tax
returns.

Most candidates would do it anyway, because they try to maintain a
pretense of representing the entire country they are campaigning to
lead, but Trump is really different in this way. I can easily imagine
he might simply refuse to campaign in California, instead dismissing
the entire state with some vulgar comment. If there is a downside for
Trump, I don't see what it could be.

Someone else (call them “Ronnie”) would then win the California
Republican primary. Certainly Ronnie is better-qualified and more
competent than Trump, and most likely Ronnie is much more attractive
to the California electorate.

Ronnie might even be more attractive than the Democratic candidate,
and might defeat them in the general election, depriving Trump's
challenger of 55 electoral votes and swinging the election heavily in
Trump's favor.

Did I miss anything?

[ Addendum 20180120: Yeah, I forgot that after the primary there is a
convention that nominates a national party candidate. Whooops.
Further discussion. ]

National Coming Out Day began in the U.S. in 1988, and within
couple of years I had started to observe it. A queer person, to
observe the event, should make an effort, each October 11, to take the
next step of coming out of the closet and being more visible, whatever
that “next step” happens to be for them.

For some time I had been wearing a little pin that said BISEXUAL
QUEER. It may be a bit hard for younger readers of my blog to
understand that in 1990 this was unusual, eccentric, and outré, even
in the extremely permissive and liberal environment of the University
of Pennsylvania. People took notice of it and asked about it; many
people said nothing but were visibly startled.

On October 11 of 1991, in one of the few overtly political acts of my
life, I posted a carefully-composed manifesto to the department-wide
electronic bulletin board, explaining that I was queer, what that
meant for me, and why I thought Coming Out Day was important. Some
people told me they thought this was brave and admirable, and others
told me they thought it was inappropriate.

As I explained in my essay:

It seemed to me that if lots of queer people came out, that would
show everyone that there is no reason to fear queers, and that it is
not hard at all to live in a world full of queer people — you have
been doing it all your life, and it was so easy you didn't even
notice! As more and more queers come out of the closet, queerness
will become more and more ordinary and commonplace, and people do
not have irrational fear of the ordinary and commonplace.

I'm not sure what I would have said if you has asked me in 1991
whether I thought this extravagant fantasy would actually happen. I
was much younger and more naïve than I am now and it's possible that I
believed that it was certain to happen. Or perhaps I would have been
less optimistic and replied with some variant on “maybe, I hope so”,
or “probably not but there are other reasons to do it”. But I am sure
that if you had asked me when I thought it would happen I would have
guessed it would be a very long time, and that I might not live to see it.

Here we are twenty-five years later and to my amazement, this worked.

Holy cow, it worked just like we hoped! Whether I believed it or not
at the time, it happened just as I said! This wild fantasy, this
cotton-candy dream, had the result we intended. We did it! And it
did not take fifty or one hundred years, I did live to see it. I have
kids and that is the world they are growing up in. Many things have
gotten worse, but not this thing.

It has not yet worked everywhere. But it will. We will keep
chipping away at the resistance, one person at a time. It worked
before and it will continue to work. There will be setbacks, but we
are an unstoppable tide.

In 1991, posting a public essay was considered peculiar or
inappropriate. In 2017, it would be eccentric because it would be
unnecessary. It would be like posting a long manifesto about how
you were going to stop white shirts and start wearing blue ones. Why
would anyone make a big deal of something so ordinary?

In 1991 I had queer co-workers whose queerness was an open secret, not
generally known. Those people did not talk about their partners in
front of strangers, and I was careful to keep them anonymous when I
mentioned them. I had written:

This note is also to try to make other queers more comfortable
here: Hi! You are not alone! I am here with you!

This had the effect I hoped, at least in some cases; some of those
people came to me privately to thank me for my announcement.

At a different job in 1995 my boss had a same-sex partner that he did
not mention. I had guessed that this was the case because all the
people with opposite-sex partners did mention them. You could
figure out who was queer by keeping a checklist in your mind of who
had mentioned their opposite-sex partners, dates, or attractions, and
then anyone you had not checked off after six months was very likely
queer. (Yes, as a bisexual I am keenly aware that this does not always
work.) This man and I both lived in Philadelphia, and one time we
happened to get off the train together and his spouse was there to
meet him. For a moment I saw a terrible apprehension in the face of
this confident and self-possessed man, as he realized he would have to
introduce me to his husband: How would I respond? What would I say?

In 2017, these people keep pictures on their desks and bring their
partners to company picnics. If I met my boss’ husband he would
introduce me without apprehension because if I had a problem with it,
it would be my problem. In 2017, my doctor has pictures of her
wedding and her wife posted on the Internet for anyone in the world to
see, not just her friends or co-workers. Around here, at least,
Coming Out Day has turned into an obsolete relic because being queer
has turned into a big fat nothing.

And it will happen elsewhere also, it will continue to spread.
Because if there was reason for optimism in 1991, how much more so now
that visible queer people are not a rare minority but a ubiquitous
plurality, now that every person encounters some of us every day, we
know that this unlikely and even childish plan not only works, but can
succeed faster and better than we even hoped?

the IRS and hundreds of other agencies can read our
communications without a warrant.

I don't know if this is
actually true, but it is certainly plausible; government agencies will
interpret the law in whatever way is most convenient for them. In any
case let's stipulate that this is correct.

The petition web site was put up by the Obama administration, with the
promise that any petition that accumulated 100,000 signatures would
receive a response. Not a decisive action, or even a substantive
response, but a response. Even this very low bar has not always been
met. But let's also stipulate that preparing and signing such a
petition has some value, at least in making the Executive respond to a demand by a largish group of voters.

Here is the specific action called for by this petition:

We call on the Obama Administration to support ECPA reform and to
reject any special rules that would force online service providers to
disclose our email without a warrant.

This is an extraordinarily weak demand, even by the already weak
standards in play here.

If the main concern is that the IRS is demanding and receiving stored
email, under the outdated provisions of the ECPA, there is a quick
solution. The IRS is part of the Department of the Treasury, which is
under the direct control of the President and his appointee the
Secretary of the Treasury. The internal regulations of the IRS are
written by the Secretary, by treasury officials they appoint, or by
civil service bureaucrats who answer to the Secretary and the
President. As long as those regulations don't conflict with an act of
Congress, they're the law.

Obama could order the Secretary of the Treasury to write new IRS
regulations requiring the IRS to seek and obtain a warrant or other
judicial declaration before demanding taxpayer emails from third
parties. He could even order this directly: “Executive order
9991: The Internal Revenue Service shall not demand, from third
parties, the disclosure of taxpayer emails, except without first
obtaining, blah blah blah…” It could be done
tomorrow—problem solved.

But the petition doesn't call on Obama or the Treasury department to
do this. In fact it doesn't call on them to actually do
anything, except to “support” some (unspecified!)
“reform”. Does this make sense? If the IRS is doing something you don't like, and
you're going to take
time to petition the Executive about it,
and the IRS is part of the Executive,
shouldn't your petition at least include a request that the IRS
stop doing the thing you don't like?

So what to think when one sees a petition like this that could so
obviously call for an immediate and substantive improvement, and
doesn't even do that?

The null hypothesis to explain this is that the guy who wrote up the
petition is just some doofus who doesn't know what he's doing. There
are a lot of those around. Suppose 17 people wrote up petitions to
address this problem; two of them are actually any good; but the one
that happened to get viral traction on the Internet is not one of
those two.

An alternative hypothesis is the conspiracy theory: the IRS, or the
Executive, promoted or even created this particular petition to draw
off energy and attention from the two that might actually result in
something happening. I'm not sure this is worth considering. As
Pierre Simon Laplace said, when asked why he didn't consider such a
possibility in a similar situation, “I had no need of that
hypothesis.”

A variation on this question asks why Cory Doctorow, who one
might suppose would know better, is promoting this petition.
Here, the null hypothesis is that Doctorow is also some doofus who
doesn't know what he's doing. The conspiracy theory version is
somewhat more interesting.

Election results
Regardless of how you felt about the individual candidates in the
recent American presidential election, and regardless of whether you
live in the United States of America, I hope you can
appreciate the deeply-felt sentiment that pervades this program:

"Go ahead, throw your vote away!"
I noticed this back in November right afer the election, when I was
reading the election returns in the newspaper. There were four
candidates for the office of U.S. Senator in Nevada. One of these was
Brendan Trainor, running for the Libertarian party.

Trainor received a total of 5,269 votes, or 0.90% of votes cast.

A fifth choice, "None of these candidates", was available. This
choice received 8,232 votes, or 1.41%.

Another candidate, David Schumann, representing the Independent
American Party, was also defeated by "None of these candidates".

I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this. I am normally
sympathetic to the attempts of independent candidates and small
parties to run for office, and I frequently vote for them. But when
your candidate fails to beat out "None of the above", all I can think
is that you must be doing something terribly wrong.